And, yes, I DO take it personally

Paul Craig Roberts: The US is well on its way to becoming a third world country

2012-03-12T15:57:00.003-07:00

writing in counterpunch, roberts once again confirms what we already know...

US economic policy continues to focus on the mega-rich at the expense of 99% of the population. US interest rates are kept at, or near to, zero in order to maximize mega-bank earnings, while depriving tens of millions of retired Americans of interest income on their lifetime savings, forcing them to spend their capital in order to live, thus depriving their heavily indebted children of inheritance.

In short, the US is well on its way to becoming a third world country, as I predicted would be the case in 20 years at a Brookings Institution conference in Washington DC early in the 21st century.

America is no longer the land of the free and independent. It is the land of the 1% mega-rich.

he further comments on the report last week of 227,000 new non-farm payroll jobs reported by the bureau of labor statistics...

Of the new jobs reported by BLS, 92% are in services. Of this 92%, only 7% could possibly relate to exportable services–architectural, engineering, and computer systems services.

Of the reported new service jobs, 29% are in health care and social services. The categories that account for the health services jobs are ambulatory health care services and hospitals. Waitresses and bartenders account for 20% of the reported new jobs.

Employment services account for 29% of the new reported jobs. Transportation and warehousing accounted for 5% of the reported new jobs, despite a loss of 60,000 jobs in general merchandise and department stores.

In other words, the vast majority of the new jobs are low paying jobs, except for a few truck drivers.

Other conclusions that we can draw are:

The US has nothing to export to reduce its massive trade deficit, which has, sooner or later, disastrous implications for the US dollar.

Middle class income jobs are declining, with polarization at the two extremes.

is this a great country or what...?

So, who's crazy here? Must be me...

2012-03-10T08:21:00.005-08:00

glenn, in commenting on the execrable labeling of dennis kucinich as a crazy wacko for opposing the insane policies and endless wars of our government, dares to point the finger at those who are truly certifiable...

The current President not only has seized the power to assassinate American citizens with no charges, but also to imprison people indefinitely with no charges, to bomb six different countries where no war is declared and where civilians are routinely killed, to invoke extreme, self-parodying levels of secrecy to hide what he does, and to prosecute wars even after Congress votes against their authorization. His cabinet is filled with people who, while in public life, advocated an aggressive attack on another country on the basis of weapons that did not exist, including his Vice President and Secretary of State. His financial team is filled with the very same people who implemented the Wall-Street-subservient policies that led to the 2008 financial crisis. Despite all that, it would be unhealthy in the extreme to hold your breath waiting for the Prospect or the Post to mock any of them as crazy or “wacky,” because what they advocate — as crazy as it is — fits comfortably within the approved orthodoxies of establishment Washington.

wouldn't it be lovely to see the tables turned and have everyone suddenly grasp the truth of the insane behavior that has so many of us in its thrall...?

Morris Berman on why America failed: "They eat each other"

2012-03-09T08:20:00.004-08:00

morris berman as interviewed by alternet on his latest book, Why America Failed: The Roots of Imperial Decline...

There is a story, probably apocryphal, of a Native American scouting expedition that came across the starving members of the Donner Party in 1847, who were snowbound in the Sierra Nevadas and resorted to cannibalism in order to survive. The expedition, which had never seen white people before, observed the Donner Party from a distance, then returned to base camp to report what they had seen. The report consisted of four words: “They eat each other.” Frankly, if I could summarize the argument of Why America Failed in a single phrase, this would be it. Unless Occupy Wall Street (or some other sociopolitical movement) manages to turn things around in a fundamental way, “They ate each other” will be our epitaph.

i'm a great fan of morris berman... i first started reading his work almost 30 years ago and it exposed me to a level of thoughtful insight that i hadn't previously experienced... i'm going to have to get my hands on this, his latest...

AIPAC and the 2012 US Presidential election - a report from Al Jazeera

2012-03-08T14:52:00.003-08:00

What role does AIPAC play in US elections?

(click image or here to access video clip)

The American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the most powerful pro-Israel lobby in the US, is holding its biggest annual conference yet with around 13,000 delegates in Washington.

For all those bidding to become the next US president, it has become an essential campaign stop. The group has strong ties to the religious right and evangelical voters. And it is a very influential force in Washington politics.

Demonstrators from the occupy movement held a small protest outside the event urging no war on Iran and no US tax dollars for Israel.

On Sunday, Barack Obama, the US president, took to the stage and told the audience that Israel had never had a better friend in the White House. But he did not support Israeli military action against Iran's nuclear facilities - at least not yet.

"If Obama treated Israel like Reagan did, he'd be impeached. Former President Ronald Reagan's confrontations with Israel were harsh and personal, yet Republican conservatives revere him and the Jews remember him as a great friend."

- Chemi Shalev, an Israeli journalist and political analyst

Three of the four Republican candidates bidding to unseat the US president addressed the conference on the biggest day of the nomination battle so far - 'Super Tuesday'.

Rick Santorum flew in especially for the event before heading back to Ohio, while Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich appeared via satellite link.

A number of Republicans have sought to attack the US president over his administration's relationship with Israel. And the Republican presidential candidates have all tried to paint Obama as an undependable partner for Israel who is weak on Iran.

Mitt Romney said: "We've heard a lot of words from the administration. Its clear message has been to warn Israel to consider the costs of military action against Iran. I don't believe we should be issuing public warnings."

And Newt Gingrich said: "If an Israeli prime minister decides that he has to avoid the threat of a second holocaust through pre-emptive measures that I would require no advance notice to understand why I would support the right of Israel to survive in a dangerous world."

So what role do pro-Israel lobby groups, and AIPAC in particular, play in the US election and why are they courted by those competing to be the next US president? How do Barack Obama's dealings with Israel compare with those of his predecessors, including Republicans?

To discuss these issues presenter Anand Naidoo is joined by: John Mearsheimer, the co-author of The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy; Larry Greenfield from the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs; and Hillary Mann Leverett, a former White House and US state department official.

the u.s. is so in bed with israel...

Afghanistan or the United States? What must it be like to live in such a corrupt country that doesn't observe the rule of law?

2012-03-08T10:28:00.005-08:00

glenn comments on the utter irony of today's nyt article decrying corruption in afghanistan...

It’s simply shocking to find a country which would allow its political class to be dominated by those who “have profited from the crony capitalism that has come to define its economic order” and who “nearly brought down” its banking system. What must it be like to live in such a country? But even more bewildering still is that the Afghans simply refuse to prosecute their high-levels financial criminals, even though the U.S. is providing advice and oversight! Maybe it’s unsurprising to see a country treat its powerful criminals with impunity, but not when they have the United States of America providing guidance and wise counsel. What could possibly explain this? Are they simply ignoring the important lessons we’re teaching and the shining example we’ve set?

i just finished talking on skype with an afghan-american friend and colleague who, with me and several other colleagues, have spent the past few years trying in vain to jump start an honest-to-god development program for an industry sector that would actually provide jobs, income and improved infrastructure for ordinary afghans... needless to say, we haven't been able to get it off the ground... neither afghans in government or business or our esteemed u.s. government officials give a shit for ordinary afghans...there's simply no money to be made helping ordinary folks...

Stephen Colbert on the CIA killing of American citizens

2012-03-07T09:37:00.002-08:00

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

Glenn: The attempt to make targeted killing of American citizens seem normal should insult anyone with the most basic understanding of American law

2012-03-06T12:11:00.005-08:00

first the aclu in response to attorney general holder's explanation yesterday for why the obama administration believes it has the authority to secretly target u.s. citizens for execution by the cia without even charging them with a crime, notifying them of the accusations, or affording them an opportunity to respond...

Few things are as dangerous to American liberty as the proposition that the government should be able to kill citizens anywhere in the world on the basis of legal standards and evidence that are never submitted to a court, either before or after the fact.

Anyone willing to trust President Obama with the power to secretly declare an American citizen an enemy of the state and order his extrajudicial killing should ask whether they would be willing to trust the next president with that dangerous power.

glenn's summation...

Holder’s attempt to make this all seem normal and common should insult anyone with the most basic understanding of American law. As The New York Times put it when first confirming the assassination program in April, 2010: ” The Obama administration has taken the extraordinary step of authorizing the targeted killing of an American citizen. . . . It is extremely rare, if not unprecedented, for an American to be approved for targeted killing, officials said. A former senior legal official in the administration of George W. Bush said he did not know of any American who was approved for targeted killing under the former president.” To date, not a single such citizen has been identified.

As always, the most important point to note for this entire debate is how perverse and warped it is that we’re even having this “debate” at all. It should be self-negating — self-marginalizing — to assert that the President, acting with no checks or transparency, can order American citizens executed far from any battlefield and without any opportunity even to know about, let alone rebut, the accusations. That this policy is being implemented and defended by the very same political party that spent the last decade so vocally and opportunistically objecting to far less extreme powers makes it all the more repellent. That fact also makes it all the more dangerous, because — as one can see — the fact that it is a Democratic President doing it, and Democratic Party officials justifying it, means that it’s much easier to normalize: very few of the Party’s followers, especially in an election year, are willing to make much of a fuss about it at all.

And thus will presidential assassination powers be entrenched as bipartisan consensus for at least a generation. That will undoubtedly be one of the most significant aspects of the Obama legacy. Let no Democrat who is now supportive or even silent be heard to object when the next Republican President exercises this power in ways that they dislike.

a stunning disregard for due process, the rule of law and the united states constitution...

Chris Hedges: We have brought state terrorism, massive destruction, war and death to the Muslim world

2012-03-05T16:29:00.004-08:00

hard-hitting stuff...

From a talk given by Chris Hedges on Saturday night in Washington, D.C., at the Occupy AIPAC protest, organized by CODEPINK Women for Peace and other peace, faith and solidarity groups.

The battle for justice in the Middle East is our battle. It is part of the vast, global battle against the 1 percent. It is about living rather than dying. It is about communicating rather than killing. It is about love rather than hate. It is part of the great battle against the corporate forces of death that reign over us—the fossil fuel industry, the weapons manufacturers, the security and surveillance state, the speculators on Wall Street, the oligarchic elites who assault our poor, our working men and women, our children, one in four of whom depend on food stamps to eat, the elites who are destroying our ecosystem with its trees, its air and its water and throwing into doubt our survival as a species.

[...]

We have not brought freedom, democracy and the virtues of Western civilization to the Muslim world. We have brought state terrorism, massive destruction, war and death. There is no moral distinction between a drone strike and the explosion of the improvised explosive device, between a suicide bombing and a targeted assassination. We have used the iron fist of the American military to implant our oil companies in Iraq, occupy Afghanistan and ensure that the Muslim world remains submissive and compliant. We have supported a government in Israel that has carried out egregious war crimes in Lebanon and Gaza and is daily stealing larger and larger portions of Palestinian land. We have established a network of military bases, some the size of small cities, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Kuwait, and we have secured basing rights in the Gulf states of Bahrain, Qatar, Oman and the United Arab Emirates. We have expanded our military operations to Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Egypt, Algeria and Yemen. And no one believes, except perhaps us, that we have any intention of leaving.

[...]

And since our elites have no vision it is up to us. The uprisings from Tunisia to Egypt to Greece to Occupy Wall Street to our gathering outside AIPAC’s doors in Washington are the same primal struggle for sanity, peace and justice, for a world wrenched free from the grip of those who would destroy it. And the abject fawning of our political elite, including Barack Obama, before AIPAC and its bank account is yet another window into the moral bankruptcy of our political class, another sign that the formal mechanisms of power are useless and broken. Civil disobedience is all we have left. It is our patriotic duty. We are called to make the cries of mothers, fathers and children in the squalid refugee camps in Gaza, in the suburbs of Tehran and in the bleak industrial wastelands in Ohio heard. We are called to stand up before these forces of death, the purveyors of violence, those whose hearts have grown cold with hatred. We are called to embrace and defend life with intensity and passion if we are to survive as a species, if we are to save our planet from the ravages of corporate greed and the specter of endless and futile war.

nothing i can add...

The insane cost and utterly dubious value of funding the American police state

2012-03-04T17:43:00.004-08:00

i've spent quite a large amount of bits, bytes and bandwidth railing against the advance of the national security state... now, i'm railing because it's here, big-time...

stephen salisbury writing in tomdispatch...

The ubiquitous fantasy of “homeland security,” pushed hard by the federal government in the wake of 9/11, has been widely embraced by the public. It has also excited intense weapons- and techno-envy among police departments and municipalities vying for the latest in armor and spy equipment.

In such a world, deadly gadgetry is just a grant request away, so why shouldn’t the 14,000 at-risk souls in Scottsbluff, Nebraska, have a closed-circuit-digital-camera-and-monitor system (cost: $180,000, courtesy of the Homeland Security Department) identical to the one up and running in New York’s Times Square?

So much money has gone into armoring and arming local law-enforcement since 9/11 that the federal government could have rebuilt post-Katrina New Orleans five times over and had enough money left in the kitty to provide job training and housing for every one of the record 41,000-plus homeless people in New York City. It could have added in the growing population of 15,000 homeless in Philadelphia, my hometown, and still have had money to spare. Add disintegrating Detroit, Newark, and Camden to the list. Throw in some crumbling bridges and roads, too.

[...]

All told, the federal government has appropriated about $635 billion, accounting for inflation, for homeland security-related activities and equipment since the 9/11 attacks. To conclude, though, that “the police” have become increasingly militarized casts too narrow a net. The truth is that virtually the entire apparatus of government has been mobilized and militarized right down to the university campus.

[...]

Government budgets at every level now include allocations aimed at fighting an ephemeral “War on Terror” in the United States. A vast surveillance and military buildup has taken place nationwide to conduct a pseudo-war against what can be imagined, not what we actually face. The costs of this effort, started by the Bush administration and promoted faithfully by the Obama administration, have been, and continue to be, virtually incalculable. In the process, public service and the public imagination have been weaponized.

We’re not just talking money eagerly squandered. That may prove the least of it. More importantly, the fundamental values of American democracy -- particularly the right to lead an autonomous private life -- have been compromised with grim efficiency. The weaponry and tactics now routinely employed by police are visible evidence of this.

[...]

The chances of an American dying in a terrorist incident in a given year are 1 in 3.5 million. To reduce that risk, to make something minuscule even more minuscule, what has the nation spent? What has it cost us? Instead of rebuilding a ravaged American city in a timely fashion or making Americans more secure in their “underwater” homes and their disappearing jobs, we have created militarized police forces, visible evidence of police-state-style funding.

and yet we all go about our daily lives, either ignorant of what is happening around us or choosing to ignore it...

Putting the Iranians in a position where they have to do something to keep from being totally screwed

2012-03-04T08:52:00.006-08:00

i just had yet another b.g.o. (blinding glimpse of the obvious)... the tactics being used by the management of american airlines i described in the previous post are the very same tactics being used by the obama administration against iran...

the b.g.o. isn't recognizing that the obama administration is using tactics calculated to provoke a bellicose reaction from iran... that part is clear... the b.g.o., for me, is seeing how the two sets of tactics are connected... both are a game of plausible deniability where, when the party (usually the relatively powerless underdog - employees, the 99% or, in this case, iran) finally has had enough of being kicked and prodded and the barks and snarls turn to attempts to bite, the provocateur can say, "see, we told you"...

i saw exactly the same dynamic at play when i worked at united airlines... senior management was obsessed with the notion that front-line employees, particularly the unionized ones, were lazy, untrustworthy and generally no damn good... when people are treated a certain way over time, they tend to respond out of that set of expectations... it's called psychological reciprocity...

glenn...

Several related points: (1) for those claiming that Obama has no other viable choice but to sanction and threaten Iran, recall that his own former adviser on Iran, Vali Nasr, harshly criticized the administration last month for failing to pursue a course of negotiations with Tehran; (2) The New York Times today has two Op-Eds on the sanctions regime being imposed on Iran — one pro and one con — which both make the point that the primary effect of this sanction regime is to cause serious suffering, even hunger, among the Iranian people; such “crippling” sanctions are usually advocated by the very same individuals who feign such concern for The Iranian People when it comes to railing against the abuses of their government (unnamed Israeli officials were quoted in the Israeli press today urging mass hunger as a means to force Iran to concede); (3) Noam Chomsky has a very dispassionate, excellent new article laying out some clear and basic facts about the Iran situation that are rarely aired; and (4) The Atlantic‘s Robert Wright explains why an air attack on Iran would almost certainly require ground force activity.

more glenn...

A few other related points: (1) the U.N. Security Council in 1981 harshly condemned the Israeli air attack on Iraq’s nuclear power facility as a “clear violation of the Charter of the United Nations and the norms of international conduct”; that Resolution also “call[ed] upon Israel urgently to place its nuclear facilities under IAEA safeguards” (via MediaLens, which notes that “even the US didn’t abstain”); (2) former Obama Pentagon official Colin Kahl argues today that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the 1981 Israeli attack on Iraq made Iraqi proliferation more likely, not less likely; (3) a cartoon from VastLeft on Obama, Iran and sanctions; and (4) Chris Toensing of the Middle East Research Information Project has an excellent article rebutting the claim (issuing from the predictable circles) that Obama is not to blame for the sky-high tensions and possible war.

chomsky...

Concerns about Israel’s nuclear arsenal have long been expressed by some observers in the United States as well. Gen. Lee Butler, former head of the U.S. Strategic Command, described Israel’s nuclear weapons as “dangerous in the extreme.” In a U.S. Army journal, Lt. Col. Warner Farr wrote that one “purpose of Israeli nuclear weapons, not often stated, but obvious, is their `use’ on the United States”—presumably to ensure consistent U.S. support for Israeli policies.

A prime concern right now is that Israel will seek to provoke some Iranian action that will incite a U.S. attack.

One of Israel’s leading strategic analysts, Zeev Maoz, in “Defending the Holy Land,” his comprehensive analysis of Israeli security and foreign policy, concludes that “the balance sheet of Israel’s nuclear policy is decidedly negative”—harmful to the state’s security. He urges instead that Israel should seek a regional agreement to ban weapons of mass destruction: a WMD-free zone, called for by a 1974 U.N. General Assembly resolution.

Meanwhile, the West’s sanctions on Iran are having their usual effect, causing shortages of basic food supplies—not for the ruling clerics but for the population. Small wonder that the sanctions are condemned by Iran’s courageous opposition.

The sanctions against Iran may have the same effect as their predecessors against Iraq, which were condemned as “genocidal” by the respected U.N. diplomats who administered them before finally resigning in protest.

The Iraq sanctions devastated the population and strengthened Saddam Hussein, probably saving him from the fate of a rogues’ gallery of other tyrants supported by the U.S.-U.K.—tyrants who prospered virtually to the day when various internal revolts overthrew them.

There is little credible discussion of just what constitutes the Iranian threat, though we do have an authoritative answer, provided by U.S. military and intelligence. Their presentations to Congress make it clear that Iran doesn’t pose a military threat.

Iran has very limited capacity to deploy force, and its strategic doctrine is defensive, designed to deter invasion long enough for diplomacy to take effect. If Iran is developing nuclear weapons (which is still undetermined), that would be part of its deterrent strategy.

The understanding of serious Israeli and U.S. analysts is expressed clearly by 30-year CIA veteran Bruce Riedel, who said in January, “If I was an Iranian national security planner, I would want nuclear weapons” as a deterrent.

i have the same sinking feeling of inevitability i had leading up to the start of the "shock and awe" campaign against iraq... i hope i'm wrong... otoh, such a monstrously and illegal act would only speed up the fall of the house of cards that been way too long in the coming... still, the resulting destruction and loss of life would be nightmarish in the extreme...

The bastards at American Airlines say they want "consensual" agreements but I ain't buyin' it

2012-03-03T20:05:00.003-08:00

the game they're playing is to make all the right noises but not to offer a damn thing and then when the unions call them on it, they blame the unions for not being "a collaborative part of the solution"... this just sets the stage for american management to seek a solution from the bankruptcy court which they have already figured out is sympathetic to management... this will ensure that contracts are eviscerated, wages slashed and a staggering number of employees kicked to the curb... you don't have to be a mind-reader to figure out this kind of bogus scenario...

American Airlines said time is running out for its unions to reach negotiated deals on cost savings targets and hinted it could ask the bankruptcy court to impose contracts on its union workers in order to win the savings the airline says it needs to exit Chapter 11.

"Every day that passes without new agreements introduces more risk to our situation," American's parent company, AMR, said in a negotiations update.

"Time is running out for union leaders to be a collaborative part of the solution," the airline said.

Earlier this week the standoff between the bankrupt carrier and its pilots' union grew increasingly tense, with the union saying the airline had little interest in reaching consensual deals with workers.

The carrier has said, however, that it prefers consensual deals to having terms imposed on workers by the court, as often happens in bankruptcy proceedings if the sides reach an impasse.

AMR repeated that position on Friday, saying company negotiators were prepared to meet at any time and that it would continue to be responsive to all union requests related to term sheets, savings targets, proposal valuations and the business plan.

But at least one union remained doubtful.

"It takes two to tango. We're not seeing a willingness to negotiate on management's side of the table," said Gregg Overman, spokesman for the Allied Pilots Association.

what a load o'crap...

Crappy news day

2012-03-02T20:16:00.000-08:00

same ol', same ol'...

Dina Rasor: Self-dealing is the No. 1 problem that is preventing our government from working

2012-03-01T10:29:00.002-08:00

~~self-dealing~~ ~~influence-peddling~~ corruption... let's call it what it is...

dina rasor posting at truthout...

The overall self-dealing problem can hopefully begin to be reformed based on the knowledge gained from the accumulation of many examples of self-dealing in the system. The American public senses that the problem is there and hears about the deluge of corrupting money in the system, but they need individual examples to understand just how destructive this self-dealing is to our democracy.

the fix is in ... the global super-rich elites are in charge and have been for a number of years... our bought-and-paid for news media have zero interest in biting the hand that feeds them so any expectation that serious proposals for reform will see the light of day are delusional...

while i admire dina rasor's efforts to "out" the truth, i am increasingly doubtful that any such work will make a difference... the systemic nature of the problem means that any solution implemented on any part of that system will be effectively neutralized by the massive forces exerted by the rest of the system...

the hard piece of reality that none of us particularly want to face is that the whole house of cards (the corporate military industrial government complex fueled by the state religion of capitalism) must come down... unless and until it does, we can propose, discuss, reveal, protest, whistle-blow and vote for the candidates of our choice until hell freezes over and won't make a damn bit of difference...

Dave Lindorff: President Obama his key advisors plus Biden, Clinton and Panetta are all currently war criminals for threatening Iran with attack

2012-02-29T16:24:00.004-08:00

so, is this why obama doesn't want to hold the war criminals from the bush administration accountable...?

President Obama and His Key Advisors are a Gang of War Criminals

Under the Nuremberg Principles, later incorporated into the United Nations Charter, to which the United States is a signatory, the planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression, which is defined as a war started against another nation that does not pose an imminent threat of attack on the aggressor nation or nations, is the highest of war crimes, for which the perpetrators are liable for the death penalty. Participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of those above acts is an equally serious capital crime.

How then to explain the casual way that civilian and military leaders of the US and Israel are talking openly about plans and threats to attack Iran?

[...]

One would think that the magnitude of the unknown and dangerous potential consequences of a criminal attack on Iran by the US and its client state Israel would lead at least some news organizations to look into the very legality of such an attack.

But no. Apparently calling the leaders of this nation criminals is beyond the imagining of the so-called chattering class and its paymasters.

I’ll do it here though:

President Obama and his key advisors, as well as Vice President Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Defense Secretary Panetta, are all currently war criminals for threatening Iran with attack. And if the US does attack Iran, either on its own or in support of an Israeli attack, they will be even worse war criminals, and will be deserving of the same fate met by Japan’s Imperial Army General and Prime Minister Hideki Tojo, and by Nazi Germany’s Foreign Minister Joachim Von Ribbentrop and Field Marshall Wilhelm Keitel.

another perspective missing from our traditional news media...

Male experts on women's reproductive health

2012-02-29T08:48:00.003-08:00

they're right... late middle age men know everything...! < cough, cough >

Women's Health Experts Speak Out

100% of male experts agree: nobody knows more about women's issues like birth control than late-middle-aged men and the Republican party is well aware.

(click on image to watch video clip)

nothing like humor to highlight pure bullshit...

Adbusters: Prepping for the upcoming G8 and NATO meetings in Chicago

2012-02-29T08:00:00.004-08:00

here's a follow-up on my post from january 26 where adbusters calls for support for the #OCCUPYCHICAGO effort to focus world attention on the failure that is capitalism during the g8 and nato meetings in chicago in may...

TACTICAL BRIEFING #26

Anarchic Swarms – The Emerging Model

[...]

The stage is set for a climactic showdown in Chicago.

The crisis of capitalism is deepening. Youth unemployment has reached 50% in Spain and Greece… 30% in Portugal and Italy… 22% in the UK… almost 20% in the US. Hundreds of millions of people around the world are waking up to the fact that their future does not compute… that their lives will be a never ending series of ecological, financial, political and personal crises… and that if we don’t rise up and start fighting for a different kind of future, we won’t have a future.

That struggle ignites again May 1.

#OCCUPYCHICAGO will be the focal point of this global spiritual insurrection… 50,000 of us will converge on the windy city and confront the G8 and NATO leaders with an ultimatum. We will set up impromptu encampments throughout the city and wage a full-spectrum memewar backed up by new tactics of anarchic swarming. Our militant in-your-face nonviolence will inspire thousands of towns, cities and campuses around the world to rise up in solidarity just like they did last October.

This is a worldwide, multi-front mutiny against the way our economic and military leaders are running the world.

[...]

Occupy has taught us all. It innovates, fractures, grows resilient and more diverse. In this spirit we celebrate the Gandhian ferocity of the Zuccottis who launched this movement with their magical assemblies and nonviolent ways … we extol the growing crop of working groups with their desire for a positive program of social and political change. And on the wild side we honor those in Oakland who have lost their fear against all odds. With this rainbow coalition, we hold our heads high and embrace the heady days of Spring.

it'll also be good practice for the upcoming republican and democratic national conventions...

The MF Global theft

2012-02-28T07:30:00.005-08:00

from the nyt...

Federal investigators examining the final days at MF Global and how customer money went missing are poring over scores of wire transfers in and out of the brokerage firm, including the possible movement of $325 million that may have belonged to customers, according to people briefed on the matter.

The suspicious transfer, which until now has not been made public, was first discovered in the early hours of Oct. 31, the day the firm filed for bankruptcy. Initially, the firm attributed a shortfall of more than $1 billion in customer money to an “accounting error,” records show. But after hours of searching, executives acknowledged to regulators in the firm’s offices in Chicago that the shortfall was real — and may have been caused in part by the $325 million transfer, said one of the people briefed on the matter.

It remains unclear where that money went, or even if it belonged to customers. But it is one of many significant wire transfers that federal authorities — including the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Federal Bureau of Investigation — have spent months reviewing to piece together MF Global’s final days.

pushing aside the patent b.s. lack of "clarity" about where the money went, atrios chooses to call it what it really is...

When a billion bucks or so goes "missing" it isn't due to complexity, or accounting errors, or those crazy moments right before the firm went bankrupt. It's theft. The money was stolen from customers and then given to somebody else. Precisely why, by who, and to whom are questions that should be answered, but the underlying issue shouldn't be obscured. People were robbed. [emphases added]

seems to be a lot of thievery goin' around these days...

Linh Dinh: The only way we can compete with foreign slaves is to become slaves ourselves

2012-02-27T14:13:00.003-08:00

an articulate and unflinching overview of the state of our nation circa february 2012...

linh dinh via information clearing house...

We fancy ourselves indebted middle-class, but this mirage is quickly evaporating. Most of us are indebted slaves. Banks conjure money out of thin air to enslave most of us for life. We must go into debt to buy a house, a car or go to school. Many of us go into debt just to eat. Like you, you and you, I will carry my shitty credit score to a mass paupers’ grave, with my hearse a U-Haul. There is a renewed emphasis on going to college as a means to success, but in this economy, a degree will likely only impoverish you further, since you will be in hock to the banksters even as you work a job completely unrelated to your dubious education. If you can even get a job, that is. Joining winos and bag ladies with smudgy and off-target makeup will be legions of useless scholars.

Still, there are perks to being house slaves of the empire, since even homeless Americans sport brand name shoes, and our poor are generally the most obese, meaning they have enough to eat, even if what they’re ingesting may shorten their lives by decades.

[...]

Deprived of their toys, many Americans will demand that their government does whatever is necessary to restore the good old days, so there will be more desperate wars, and more repression of those who oppose this American way of life. Meanwhile, the media will serve up opulent fantasies to feed a nostalgia for this lost and glorious past. The poorer we become, the richer we will look on television.

Americans will have less, and our lives will be harder, but no one wants to talk about this decline, least of all politicians, since that would be the quickest way to not get elected, but even if we had a wise and ethical leadership, our country will still go into decline, because the resources for infinite growth are simply not there. They never were, of course, since this is a finite planet, after all, where natural limits must be reached sooner or later. That moment is now, unfortunately.

Don’t kid yourself that the fiery anger burning through Greece, Spain and elsewhere won’t be but a tame prelude to what will happen here, what with our robust sense of entitlement, deep alienation and trigger happy ways. Our government seems to anticipate as much, for it has put into place all of the physical and legal means to clamp down on us hard, when things do explode.

more linh dinh - and some terrific, gritty photos of the philly/camden area - at his website here...

Mr. Fish' take on corporate America remembering to serve the common good

2012-02-27T13:40:00.002-08:00

i seem to be on a bit of a visual streak...

mr. fish...

see more of mr. fish here...

More Adbusters

2012-02-26T17:10:00.001-08:00

i like their stuff... see even more here...

Why does the criminal banker Larry Summers continue to command a global forum?

2012-02-26T13:59:00.002-08:00

probably because the venue is the financial times, the newspaper of the 0.0001%...

The US tax system needs rebuilding

By Lawrence Summers

i won't even bother posting snippets from the above article... suffice it to say, summers starts out by sounding the alarm about "entitlements," social security, medicare, etc., and then goes on to suggest the plenary solution to everything that ails us is to revisit the catfood commission (simpson-bowles)...

however, the most galling piece of information to come my way this past week is that summers' name is actually being floated by obama as a replacement for zoellick at the world bank... fuck... what do we have to do to get rid of these dangerously evil people...?

Larry Summers To Run World Bank? 37,000 Sign Petition Saying No In 24 Hours

anybody who's got two brain cells to rub together should be putting his or her name on that petition... you can do it here...

Adbusters #100

2012-02-25T15:26:00.001-08:00

Alexander Cockburn: Rick Santorum is the most fanatical Christian to run for the Republican nomination in the modern era, maybe any era

2012-02-24T17:46:00.004-08:00

living through the slow-motion train wreck that is the endless 2012 presidential election is one of the most painful experiences of my 64 years and candidates like rick santorum push the pain level to almost intolerable levels...

from counterpunch...

Surely Rick Santorum is the most fanatical Christian to run for the Republican nomination in the modern era, maybe any era. Next to him Pat Robertson, billionaire founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network, who ran for the nomination in 1988, has the tolerant, glassy-eyed bonhomie of the late Dean Martin. Robertson has always been in show business. Four years ago we had Mike Huckabee, the evangelist and former governor of Arkansas, one of the boys, shacked up with Mrs Huckabee in his doublewide on the grounds of the Arkansas gubernatorial mansion. He has always been in show business too.

But with Santorum – a conservative Roman Catholic and member of Opus Dei – there’s a truly manic edge to his religious pronouncements and activities. It was Santorum and Mrs S, don’t forget, who took their still-born baby home from the hospital and laid it among their living tots, telling them, “he’s with the angels now,” an episode Mrs Santorum later recorded in a memoir.

Santorum doesn’t believe in the right to privacy. Not that Obama has any qualms about taps on your phone and powers of arbitrary arrest, but he probably doesn’t care too much about whatever human combos are being tried out in the bedroom. Santorum frets 24/7 about beastliness and unnatural acts, and yearns to restore full rights to snoops to kick down the motel door, twitch aside the blankets and haul couples off for all manner of moral abominations.

Contraception in Santorum’s opinion is “a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be”. Pre-natal testing is also a no-no for Santorum, father of eight.   In 2003 Santorum said he favored having laws against polygamy, adultery, sodomy, and other actions “antithetical to a healthy, stable, traditional family”. The possibility of bestiality in today’s licentious times bothers him a lot — “man on dog,” as he famously put it on a talk show. Not for him the possibility of abortion in cases of rape: “I believe and I think that the right approach is to accept this horribly created, in the sense of rape, but nevertheless, in a very broken way, a gift of human life, and accept what God is giving to you.”

[...]

Why is a guy like this currently running neck-and-neck with Mitt Romney for the Republican nomination? The usual maps drawn by political experts stipulate that at some point in the prolonged nomination battle the candidate has to shed the gothick nuttiness and over-the-topness that got him traction in the early primaries and reach out to the independents without whose support no presidential bid can succeed.

There’s zero sign that Santorum is of any disposition to do this. So why does he turn out to be the last man standing in the path of the Mormon billionaire Mitt Romney in the battle for the nomination?

First and foremost, he’s not Mitt Romney.

ain't it amazin' how somebody like santorum can actually make somebody like romney seem not all that bad and somebody like romney can make a two-timing, bait-and-switch president like obama seem halfway acceptable...? nah... screw 'em all, every damn one of 'em...

The secret drone wars - the quiet expansion of presidential power under Obama

2012-02-24T07:45:00.004-08:00

from reuters...

The Obama Administration has approved five times the number of covert drone strikes that his predecessor did. Thomson Reuters Digital Editor Chrystia Freeland sits down with Reuters' Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist David Rohde to discuss his special report detailing the quiet expansion of presidential power under Obama.

glenn...

David Rohde, the Pulitzer-Prize-winning former New York Times reporter and current Reuters columnist, explains how President Obama has significantly expanded executive power and triggered massive anti-American rage in the world through the use of drones and assassinations — or, as Stephanie Cutter and modern-day Democrats would say, he’s showing how Tough And Strong he is (it should be noted that Rohde, who spent months as a hostage of the Taliban, knows much about what motivates anti-American hatred and Terrorism)...

imagine seeing pakistani drones circling over your neighborhood... imagine having your neighbors or members of your family killed by a drone strike... yes... imagine...

Atrios: Stealing homes, then destroying them and their communities

2012-02-23T08:47:00.003-08:00

he's referring to this...

Across the country, big banks and other large investors are buying up tens of thousands of foreclosed rental properties. They're not always model landlords, according to tenants and regulators. Some banks are failing to follow local and state housing codes, leaving tenants to live in squalor — without even a number to call in the most dire situations.

[...]

That's difficult even when there is a property manager. Luz Escamilla in Hyattsville, Md., says she sleeps with the lights on, "waiting for the bugs to come up." Her place is infested. There are chocolate-colored blotches all over her walls; it's the blood of bedbugs she has killed. [Note: the blood isn't "the blood of bedbugs," it's the blood of Luz Escamilla that has been ingested by the bedbugs.]

[...]

[Anne] Norton, the Maryland bank regulator, says it's often more challenging to take a bank to court than a mom-and-pop landlord.

"Due to disproportional bargaining rights between tenants and the parties that are the investors, tenants feel that they don't have a voice and also don't have rights," Norton says.

States are at a loss, too. They aren't sure how to make banks comply with their housing codes. Norton and nine other regulators are now drafting guidelines to help states crack down.

i find it downright amazing how rapidly the u.s. is making the descent to the status of 3d world country...

European Parliament puts ACTA on hold

2012-02-22T11:46:00.004-08:00

note that other nations are treating acta as a "proper treaty," not as the bullshit "executive agreement" signed by obama...

good news but the battle is far from over...

In a major victory for Internet freedom activists, the European parliament on Wednesday placed the ratification of a controversial copyright treaty on hold and asked the European Court of Justice to rule on whether the provisions align with the European Union’s “fundamental rights and freedoms.”

The announcement came following publication of a letter written by Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, beseeching E.U. leaders to abandon the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Act (ACTA).

Tusk was previously a strong supporter of the treaty, but weeks of demonstrations in Poland and across Europe convinced him to withdraw support. Although Poland has already signed the treaty, Tusk said the nation will not pursue full ratification.

Although ACTA has been ratified by 22 E.U. member states, along with Canada, Japan, South Korea, Morocco, New Zealand, Australia and Singapore, a number of very important nations have begun to question the logic of importing American copyright standards.

Germany, Denmark, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia have emerged as leaders of Europe’s ACTA opposition. The European parliament’s announcement on Wednesday seems to indicate that the E.U.’s trade chief, Karel De Gucht, has now joined them.

Crafted in the U.S., ACTA was signed by President Barack Obama without Congressional approval because the administration deemed it to be an “executive agreement” that exports U.S. copyright law and does not alter current statutes. Other nations are treating ACTA as a proper treaty, meaning the process of adoption is much more complicated.

[...]

While the E.U. may be hedging its bets on ACTA, the pending court ruling will not prevent any additional states from ratifying the treaty on their own, which the U.S. has strongly encouraged them to do through its trade policies. The announcement Wednesday will, however, significantly delay an E.U. parliament vote on the treaty, which was originally scheduled for June.

the effort of our super-rich elites to gain control over the internet isn't going to go away any time soon...

James Howard Kunstler: The banking system is just blowing smoke up the shredded ass of what's left of the economy

2012-02-22T08:03:00.005-08:00

kunstler takes on the rantings of the unhinged repubs and compares them to the equally unhinged democratic denials of reality...

[I]t's especially gratifying to see the Republicans sail off the edge of their own flat earth on the winds of religious idiocy. For forty years it has not been enough for them to just be a conservative party. They had to enlist the worst elements of ignorance and reaction, and they found an endless supply of it in the boom regions of the Sunbelt with its brotherhood of TV evangelist con-artists and a population fretful with suburban angst.

[...]

Just as there is a place for conservatism in civilized life, there is also a place for the progressive impulse, let's call it - for making bold advance in step with the mandates of reality and an interest in justice for all those along on the journey.

The Democrats under Obama don't want to go to that place. They want to really go to the same place as the fretful Sunbelt fundamentalists, but by a different route - and that place is yesterday, by means of a campaign to sustain the unsustainable. Mr. Obama is pretending that an economic "recovery" is underway when he knows damn well that the banking system is just blowing smoke up the shredded ass of what's left of that economy. He pretends to an interest in the rule of law in money matters but he's done everything possible to prevent the Department of Justice, the SEC, and a dozen other regulatory authorities from functioning the way they were designed. He has never suggested resurrecting the Glass-Steagall act, which kept banking close to being honest for forty years. He never issued a peep of objection about the Citizens United case where the Supreme Court tossed the election process into a crocodile pit of corporate turpitude (he could have proposed a constitutional amendment redefining corporate "personhood."). He declared he'd never permit a super-PAC to be created in his name, and now he's got one. Mr. Obama represents a lot of things to a lot of people. He is mainly Progressivism's bowling trophy, its symbol of its own triumphant wonderfulness in overcoming the age old phantoms of race prejudice. Alas, that's not enough. Where exactly is the boundary between telling "folks" what they want to hear and just flat-out lying?

when people are afraid, they will listen to just about anything that they think can reduce their fear...

if the world as i had always known it was coming down around my ears and i had no idea what was going to happen next, i would be VERY receptive to anyone and everyone who presented themselves as having a solution at hand...

whether it's the repubs promising that they will vanquish all society's great "evils" - brown people, gay people, non-christian people, poor people, uppity women, uppity presidents, uppity countries, the list goes on - or the dems promising a return to the go-go economy, people who live in fear will be very responsive...

the one thing fearful people DON'T want to hear is anyone spouting reality...

Occupy reduced violence in Oakland

2012-02-21T07:08:00.001-08:00

rebecca solnit in tomdispatch...

Now here’s something astonishing. While the camp was in existence, crime went down 19% in Oakland, a statistic the city was careful to conceal. "It may be counter to our statement that the Occupy movement is negatively impacting crime in Oakland," the police chief wrote to the mayor in an email that local news station KTVU later obtained and released to little fanfare. Pay attention: Occupy was so powerful a force for nonviolence that it was already solving Oakland’s chronic crime and violence problems just by giving people hope and meals and solidarity and conversation.
The police attacking the camp knew what the rest of us didn’t: Occupy was abating crime, including violent crime, in this gritty, crime-ridden city.

interesting statistic...

Occupy the SEC - the Occupy suits take on the Wall Street suits

2012-02-21T05:49:00.006-08:00

a superb use of some of the higher-level talent in the occupy ranks...

To attempt to oversee the unwieldy bloated tyrants, Congress passed 848 pages of financial reform legislation in 2010. But it was so difficult to comprehend that to implement just one piece of it, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) together with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Federal Reserve Board, and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency filed a 530-page public proposal seeking comment on how the legislation might impact the markets. The deadline for those comments came last week.

[...]

Hoping to derail the derailers is a new SEC sheriff: Occupy the SEC, a spinoff of Occupy Wall Street. Going forward, it will be tougher for right-wing corporate media to spin the Occupy movement as smelly hippie radicals desperate for a cause; any cause. Last week, Wall Street spin doctors just got chewed up in the spin cycle and hung out to dry with Occupy the SEC’s filing of a mesmerizing 325-page treatise on redesigning Wall Street to meet the Nation’s needs rather than its perpetuation as a wealth extraction scheme by lawyered up 1 percenters. (The number of lawyers providing public comment was exceeded only by Wall Street firms.)

Far removed from the unstructured demands of the overall Occupy movement, the 325-page tome is precise, hard hitting and essentially nails the core corrupting elements of the current system and lays out what must change. It shows an uncanny insider’s grasp of the minutiae in the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation. And, it is more than 171 pages longer than the collective rant of Wall Street’s own sycophant trade groups, the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA), American Bankers Association, the Financial Services Roundtable, and the Clearing House Association. The trade group letter called the proposal “absurd” and lectured the regulators that they should first “do no harm.” There is striking and arrogant amnesia in this letter regarding the staggering harm done to this Nation by their constituents.

it takes brainy, experienced people to take on brainy experienced vermin...

U.S. human rights abuse hypocrisy

2012-02-20T13:52:00.002-08:00

glenn (of course)...

Each year, the U.S. State Department, as required by law, issues a “Human Rights Report” which details abuses by other countries. To call it an exercise in hypocrisy is to understate the case: it is almost impossible to find any tyrannical power denounced by the State Department which the U.S. Government (and its closest allies) do not regularly exercise itself.

hypocrisy is what we're all about...

The "crisis of capitalism" has consolidated its dominance and exploitation over the rest of society

2012-02-20T13:25:00.004-08:00

james petras talks about why we might want to consider socialism in light of the unending rape and pillage of world resources by our super-rich elites...

Finance capital, the principle detonator of the crash and crises, recovered, the capitalist class as a whole was strengthened, and most important of all, it utilized the political, social, ideological conditions created as a result of “the crises” to further consolidate their dominance and exploitation over the rest of society.

In other words, the ‘crises of capital’ has been converted into a strategic advantage for furthering the most fundamental interests of capital: the enlargement of profits, the consolidation of capitalist rule, the greater concentration of ownership, the deepening of inequalities between capital and labor and the creation of huge reserves of labor to further augment their profits.

[...]

A recent study reports “US corporate profits are higher as a share of gross domestic product than at any time since 1950” (FT 1/30/12). US companies cash balances have never been greater, thanks to intensified exploitation of workers, and a multi-tiered wage systems in which new hires work for a fraction of what older workers receive (thanks to agreements signed by ‘door mat’ labor bosses).

The “crises of capitalism” ideologues have ignored the financial reports of the major US corporations.According to General Motors 2011 report to its stockholders,they celebrated the greatest profit ever,turning a profit of $7.6 billion, surpassing the previous record of $6.7 billion in 1997.A large part of these profits results from the freezing of its underfunded US pension funds and extracting greater productivity from fewer workers-in other words intensified exploitation-and cutting hourly wages of new hires by half.(Earthlink News 2/16/12)

Moreover the increased importance of imperialist exploitation is evident as the share of US corporate profits extracted overseas keeps rising at the expense of employee income growth.

[...]

A real capitalist crisis would adversely affect profit margins, gross earnings and the accumulation of “cash piles”. Rising profits are being horded because as capitalists profit from intense exploitation , mass consumption stagnates.

Crises theorists confuse what is clearly the degrading of labor, the savaging of living and working conditions and even the stagnation of the economy, with a ‘crises’ of capital: when the capitalist class increases its profit margins, hoards trillions, it is not in crises. The key point is that the ‘crises of labor’ is a major stimulus for the recovery of capitalist profits. We cannot generalize from one to the other. No doubt there was a moment of capitalist crises (2008-2009) but thanks to the capitalist state’s unprecedented massive transfer of wealth from the public treasury to the capitalist class – Wall Street banks in the first instance – the corporate sector recovered, while the workers and the rest of the economy remained in crises, went bankrupt and out of work.

[...]

Socialism is no longer the scare word of the past. Socialism involves the large-scale reorganization of the economy, the transfer of trillions from the coffers of predator classes’ of no social utility to the public welfare. This change can finance a productive and innovative economy based on work and leisure, study and sport. Socialism replaces the everyday terror of dismissal with the security that brings confidence, assurance and respect to the workplace. Workplace democracy is at the heart of the vision of 21st century socialism. We begin by nationalizing the banks and eliminating Wall Street. Financial institutions are redesigned to create productive employment, to serve social welfare and to preserve the environment. Socialism would begin the transition, from a capitalist economy directed by predators and swindlers and a state at their command, toward an economy of public ownership under democratic control.

we need to start taking a hard look at reality... capitalism is a profoundly broken system and we need to face the fact that it has also become a ideological doctrine, no more or less than any other religion...

Greece: If there had not been an explosion of anger, I would have felt adrift in a sea of depression

2012-02-20T12:31:00.005-08:00

john holloway in the guardian via information clearing house......

Greece shows us how to protest against a failed system

I do not like violence. I do not think that very much is gained by burning banks and smashing windows. And yet I feel a surge of pleasure when I see the reaction in Athens and the other cities in Greece to the acceptance by the Greek parliament of the measures imposed by the European Union. More: if there had not been an explosion of anger, I would have felt adrift in a sea of depression.
The joy is the joy of seeing the much-trodden worm turn and roar. The joy of seeing those whose cheeks have been slapped a thousand times slapping back. How can we ask of people that they accept meekly the ferocious cuts in living standards that the austerity measures imply? Do we want them to just agree that the massive creative potential of so many young people should be just eliminated, their talents trapped in a life of long-term unemployment? All that just so that the banks can be repaid, the rich made richer? All that, just to maintain a capitalist system that has long since passed its sell-by date, that now offers the world nothing but destruction. For the Greeks to accept the measures meekly would be to multiply depression by depression, the depression of a failed system compounded by the depression of lost dignity.

The violence of the reaction in Greece is a cry that goes out to the world. How long will we sit still and see the world torn apart by these barbarians, the rich, the banks? How long will we stand by and watch the injustices increase, see the health service dismantled, education reduced to uncritical nonsense, the water resources of the world privatised, communities wiped out and the earth torn up for the profits of mining companies?

The attack that is so acute in Greece is taking place all over the world. Everywhere money is subjecting human and non-human life to its logic, the logic of profit. This is not new, but the intensity and breadth of the attack is new, and new too is the general awareness that the current dynamic is a dynamic of death, that it is likely that we are all heading towards the annihilation of human life on earth. When the learned commentators explain the details of the latest negotiations between the governments on the future of the eurozone, they forget to mention that what is being negotiated so blithely is the future of humanity.

boy, does he get that right... money has taken over the world...

The bait-and-switch bank settlement

2012-02-19T07:24:00.003-08:00

yeah, like we didn't suspect all along that this was the case...

Bank Settlement Was a Bait and Switch All Along

Occupy in Solidarity with the Greeks: "We're all Greeks Now"

2012-02-18T08:48:00.003-08:00

what a sad state of affairs... the raping and pillaging continues unabated and we're all at great risk...

Protest, Syntagma Square, Athens

#OWS Joins International Day of Action: We Are All Greeks Now
Tomorrow, the people of Greece will take to the streets again to occupy Syntagma Square in protest of the extreme austerity measures being imposed on the backs of the Greek 99% to the joy and benefit of the European financial elite. The 99% everywhere are under assault by the same global banking interests. Greece is merely the most severe economic crisis yet to be imposed by the International Monetary Fund and other agents of the 1% in the Global North. People all over the world live under the tyranny of policies dictated by the IMF, the World Bank, and the G8. As demonstrated by the wholesale slashing of social services in the name of "debt reduction," New York City and the United States are not immune.
Our resistance to austerity will also be global. This weekend, the people of cities across the world will take to the streets in solidarity with the Greek protesters who have occupied their workplaces and public spaces to resist economic injustice. Demonstrations are planned throughout Germany, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Spain, Finland, France, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Portgual, the United Kingdom, the United States, Sweden, and more. Click here for a partial listing of international rallies on Facebook. Occupy Chicago held a Greece solidarity rally yesterday. There is a rally today in San Francisco and tomorrow in New York City.

i like greece... i like the greeks... i've spent some time there and it's a wonderful country... they don't deserve this shit... nobody does...

Moyers: Freedom of and From Religion

2012-02-16T14:54:00.003-08:00

the war on contraception and birth control...

Bill Moyers Essay: Freedom of and From Religion from BillMoyers.com on Vimeo.

The Catholic bishops had cast the president's intended policy as an infringement on their religious freedom; they hold birth control to be a mortal sin, and were incensed that the government might coerce them to treat it otherwise. The president in effect said: No quarrel there; no one's going to force you to violate your doctrine. But Catholics are also Americans, and if an individual Catholic worker wants coverage, she should have access to it -- just like any other American citizen. Under the new plan, she will. She can go directly to the insurer, and the religious institution is off the hook.

When the president announced his new plan, the bishops were caught flat-footed. It was so ... so reasonable.

[...]

So the battle over contraception no longer seems apocalyptic. No heavenly hosts pitted against the forces of Satan. It's a political brawl, not a crusade of believers or infidels. The president skillfully negotiated the line between respect for the religious sphere and protection of the spiritual dignity and freedom of individuals.

meanwhile, in a farce worthy of monty python, women are barred from a congressional hearing on birth control...

Birth control witness panel photo – made up completely of men – goes viral

via @thinkprogress Twitter
Photo of the witness table at GOP hearing on proposed birth
control benefit measure.

This is your democracy on meth

2012-02-16T08:24:00.003-08:00

post title courtesy of timothy egan in the nyt...

Newt’s Shop of Horrors

ari berman in tomdispatch...

Tomgram: Ari Berman, The Politics of the Super Rich

[T]he super PACs on both sides of the aisle are financed by the 1% of the 1%. Romney’s Restore Our Future Super PAC, founded by the general counsel of his 2008 campaign, has led the herd, raising $30 million, 98% from donors who gave $25,000 or more. Ten million dollars came from just 10 donors who gave $1 million each. These included three hedge-fund managers and Houston Republican Bob Perry, the main funder behind the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth in 2004, whose scurrilous ads did such an effective job of destroying John Kerry’s electoral prospects. Sixty-five percent of the funds that poured into Romney’s super PAC in the second half of 2011 came from the finance, insurance and real estate sector, otherwise known as the people who brought you the economic meltdown of 2007-2008.

[...]

Before Citizens United, the maximum amount one person could give to a candidate was $2,500; for a political action committee, $5,000; for a political party committee, $30,800. Now, the sky’s the limit for a super PAC, and even more disturbingly, any donor can give an unlimited contribution to a 501c4 -- outfits defined by the IRS as “civic leagues or organizations not organized for profit but operated exclusively for the promotion of social welfare,” and to make matters worse, that contribution will remain eternally secret. In this way, American politics is descending further into the darkness, with 501c4s quickly gaining influence as “shadow super PACs.”

so, the u.s. has now officially joined the ranks of third world countries whose super-rich elites have routinely bought and sold the national assets of their people to the highest bidder, the common good be damned...

Glenn on the drums beating for war with Iran

2012-02-16T06:38:00.004-08:00

where did we hear all this nonsense before...? oh, yeah... i remember...

U.S. media takes the lead on Iran

Many have compared the coordinated propaganda campaign now being disseminated about The Iranian Threat to that which preceded the Iraq War, but there is one notable difference. Whereas the American media in 2002 followed the lead of the U.S. government in beating the war drums against Saddam, they now seem even more eager for war against Iran than the U.S. government itself, which actually appears somewhat reluctant. Consider this highly illustrative, one-minute report yesterday from the nightly broadcast of NBC News with Brian Williams, by the network’s Chief Pentagon Correspondent Jim “Mik” Miklaszewski, which packs multiple misleading narratives into one short package:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Diane Sawyer and Brian Ross belong in a fear-mongering museum

I just saw this two-minute ABC News report from Diane Sawyer and Brian Ross that sinks to even lower depths than what I highlighted yesterday. It has to be seen to be believed. It’s a perfect museum exhibit for how empty-headed American media stars uncritically recite whatever they are told by government officials, exaggerate or fabricate bad acts by the designated Enemy du Jour while ignoring and suppressing the precipitating acts of America and its client states, and just generally do whatever they can to keep fear levels and war thirst as high as possible. This is nothing short of irresponsible propagandistic trash:

video platform video management video solutions video player

what a load of bollocks...

"Savage austerity measures" in Greece

2012-02-15T15:00:00.003-08:00

from the real news network with paul jay and michael hudson...

More at The Real News

Paul Jay: In Greece, the financial elites of Europe have gotten agreement from the Greek government to another round of what some people are calling savage austerity measures, for example, lowering the minimum wage by 22 percent, a new round of privatizations, and cuts to pensions and many other social programs.

[...]

Michael Hudson: Finance today achieves what military invasion used to do in times past. So the new mode of warfare is financial, not military. It's much cheaper and it's much safer for the country doing the attack.

[...]

And in this morning's newspaper, when it turned out that Greece's GDP fell at 7 percent annual rate, not the 5 percent expected, as usual the newspaper said, to everyone's surprise, the situation is worse than projected. Well, of course it wasn't really to our surprise, because we know that when you're strangling an economy, of course it can't cope very well. And they're strangling the Greeks economy. And they're using it, I think, as a laboratory experiment to say, what's going to happen when we really just squeeze labor and squeeze labor? It's like trying to feed a horse less and less and see whether it's really going to be more efficient until it keels over dead.

yes, let's beat that dead horse... by all means...

When plunder becomes a way of life

2012-02-14T15:11:00.003-08:00

moyers & co...

Here’s what we’re up against. Read it and weep: “America’s Plutocrats Play the Political Ponies.” That’s a headline in “Too Much,” an Internet publication from the Institute for Policy Studies that describes itself as “an online weekly on excess and inequality.”

Yes, the results are in and our elections have replaced horse racing as the sport of kings. Only these kings aren’t your everyday poobahs and potentates. These kings are multi-billionaires, corporate moguls who by the divine right, not of God, but the United States Supreme Court and its Citizens United decision, are now buying politicians like so much pricey horseflesh. All that money pouring into super PACs, much of it from secret sources: merely an investment, should their horse pay off in November, in the best government money can buy.

They’re shelling out fortunes' worth of contributions. Look at just a few of them: Mitt Romney’s hedge fund pals Robert Mercer, John Paulson, Julian Robertson and Paul Singer – each of whom has ponied up a million or more for the super PAC called “Restore Our Future” -- as in, "Give us back the go-go days, when predators ruled Wall Street like it was Jurassic Park.”

[...]

When all is said and done, this race for the White House may cost more than two billion dollars. What’s getting trampled into dust are the voices of people who aren't rich, not to mention what's left of our democracy. As Democratic pollster Peter Hart told The New Yorker magazine’s Jane Mayer, “It’s become a situation where the contest is how much you can destroy the system, rather than how much you can make it work. It makes no difference if you have a ‘D’ or an ‘R’ after your name. There’s no sense that this is about democracy, and after the election you have to work together, and knit the country together.”

These gargantuan super PAC contributions are not an end in themselves. They are the means to gain control of government – and the nation state -- for a reason. The French writer and economist Frederic Bastiat said it plainly: "When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living in society, they create for themselves, in the course of time, a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it." That’s what the super PACs are bidding on. For the rest of us, the ship may already have sailed.

rape, pillage and plunder...

Perhaps "anarchy" has gotten a bad rap

2012-02-14T07:15:00.003-08:00

in this article from alternet by david morris, originally posted in on the commons, anarchy, as defined by petr kropotkin, is equated to cooperation and collaboration...

Kropotkin honored Darwin’s insights about natural selection but believed the governing principle of natural selection was cooperation, not competition. The fittest were those who cooperated.

“The animal species, in which individual struggle has been reduced to its narrowest limits, and the practice of mutual aid has attained the greatest development, are invariably the most numerous, the most prosperous, and the most open to further progress. … The unsociable species, on the contrary, are doomed to decay.”

He spent the rest of his life promoting that concept and the theory of social structure known as anarchism. To Americans anarchism is synonymous with a lack of order. But to Kropotkin anarchist societies don’t lack order but the order emerges from rules designed by those who feel their impact, rules that encourage humanly scaled production systems and maximize individual freedom and social cohesion.

In his article on Anarchy in the 1910 Encyclopedia Britannica Kropotkin defines anarchism as a society “without government – harmony in such a society being obtained, not by submission to law, or by obedience to any authority, but by free agreements concluded between the various groups, territorial and professional, freely constituted for the sake of production and consumption…”

in my opinion, the term "self-organizing systems" is not only more descriptive but also a great deal more palatable than "anarchy"... the concept of self-organizing systems is a well-studied element of complex adaptive systems that has emerged from research done by the santa fe institute... the concept began with chaos theory and complexity theory and has since been applied to many systems - economic, social, organizational, mathematical, physical, etc. - with great validity... it also totally supports the collaborative and cooperative fundamentals revealed in kropotkin's research...

Glenn talks about immunity and disdain for the rule of law by the U.S. gov't and compares it to recent developments in Pakistan

2012-02-14T04:57:00.004-08:00

worth reading...

It is virtually impossible to imagine the U.S. Supreme Court ordering the CIA to disclose documents about its treatment of detainees or, even more unrealistically, to permit the victims of CIA abuse to have their grievances heard in court. Anyone who doubts that can simply review the past decade of full-scale immunity bestowed by the Justice Department and subservient American federal courts on all executive agencies in the War on Terror. We should think about that the next time some American pundit, politician, or media figure righteously holds forth on how undemocratic and oppressive is Pakistan as opposed to the U.S.

is the u.s. a great country or what...?

Greece's death sentence

2012-02-13T15:06:00.000-08:00

mike whitney... here's a teaser...

It’s just corporate pillaging gone haywire. Greece is a big pinata that’s just been cracked open and everyone is pushing and shoving to grab their fistful of candy.

by all means, go read it all, but stay close to the toilet in case of retching...

This is what happens when you push people too far and ask them to pay for your mistakes

2012-02-13T10:07:00.000-08:00

this is what austerity looks like in greece...

from spiegel...

here's the article...

'The Troika's Policies Have Failed'

European Doubts Growing over Greece Debt Strategy

Powerlessness and Occupy

2012-02-13T07:53:00.000-08:00

chris hedges...

The security and surveillance state has a vast arsenal and array of tools at its disposal. It operates in secret. It dissembles and lies. It hides behind phony organizations and individuals who use false histories and false names. It has millions of dollars to spend, the capacity to deny not only its activities but also its existence. Its physical assets honeycomb the country. It can wiretap, eavesdrop and monitor every form of communication. It can hire informants, send in clandestine agents, recruit members within the movement by offering legal immunity, churn out a steady stream of divisive propaganda and amass huge databases and clandestine operations centers. And it is authorized to use deadly force.

How do we fight back? We do not have the tools or the wealth of the state. We cannot beat it at its own game. We cannot ferret out infiltrators. The legal system is almost always on the state’s side. If we attempt to replicate the elaborate security apparatus of our oppressors, even on a small scale, we will unleash widespread paranoia and fracture the movement. If we retreat into anonymity, hiding behind masks, then we provide an opening for agents provocateurs who deny their identities while disrupting the movement. If we fight pitched battles in the streets we give authorities an excuse to fire their weapons.

[...]

We must assume we are targets. And we must fight back by relying on our strength, which in the great paradox of resistance movements is embodied in our weakness. This does not mean we will avoid being repressed or persecuted. It will not keep us safe from slander, lies or jail. But it does offer the capacity to create internal divisions in the apparatus of the oppressors rather than permit the oppressors to create internal divisions within the movement. Divided loyalties create paralysis. And it is our job to paralyze them, not allow them to paralyze us.

the assumption that we are targets is both a safe and a correct assumption... there's a big difference in basing an assumption on multiple observations of reality and making an assumption based purely on paranoia...

The war on whistleblowers: "We don’t need to ask who you’re talking to. We know."

2012-02-13T06:00:00.000-08:00

an insightful and chilling reminder of the reality of the national security state that is the u.s. of a...

from yesterday's nyt...

“The government does not pursue every leak,” said Mark Corallo, who served as the Justice Department’s spokesman in Mr. Bush’s administration. “On balance, it is more important that the media have the ability to report. It’s important to our democracy.”

That does not seem to be the view of the Obama administration, which has brought more prosecutions against current or former government officials for providing classified information to the media than every previous administration combined.

“It increases the level of paranoia,” Steven Aftergood, an expert on government secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, said of recent trends. “As security has been ratcheted up, so has the anxiety of many government officials about dealing with the press and the public.”

Mr. Corallo, who served under Mr. Bush’s attorney general John D. Ashcroft, said he was “sort of shocked” by the volume of leak prosecutions under President Obama. “We would have gotten hammered for it,” he said.

[...]

[Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press] ... described a conference in June organized by the Aspen Institute that brought together lawyers, journalists and intelligence officials to talk about government secrecy.

[...]

“I was told in a rather cocky manner” by a national security representative, Ms. Dalglish recalled, that “the Risen subpoena is one of the last you’ll see.”

She continued, paraphrasing the official: “We don’t need to ask who you’re talking to. We know.”

The solution for reporters, Ms. Dalglish said, is to adopt Mr. Woodward’s methods from the 1970s. “For God’s sake, get off of e-mail,” she said. “Get off of your cellphone. Watch your credit cards. Watch your plane tickets. These guys in the N.S.A. know everything”.

Mr. Corallo, the former Justice Department spokesman, provided corresponding advice to government officials. “Don’t be stupid and use e-mail,” he said. “You have to meet a reporter face to face, hand him an envelope and walk away quickly.”

i have said more times than i care to count, if you use ANY form of electronic communication - mobile phone, email, atm, credit cards, wifi, any internet connection, even your supermarket affinity card - you can safely make the assumption that your EVERY transaction is being sniffed at minimum and very likely recorded for possible later retrieval and this holds true across the world... no country is safe...

(thanks to glenn greenwald for the tip...)

Why are SOME terrorist organizations not treated as terrorist organizatons?

2012-02-11T09:13:00.001-08:00

inquiring minds want to know...

glenn...

[T]hose who are politically and financially well-connected are free to commit even the most egregious crimes; for that reason, the very idea of prosecuting [Rudy] Giuliani, [Ed] Rendell, [Tom] Ridge, [Fran] Townsend, [Howard] Dean and friends for their paid labor on behalf of a Terrorist group [Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK)] is unthinkable, a suggestion not fit for decent company, even though powerless Muslims have been viciously prosecuted for far less egregious connections to such groups. But this incident also underscores the specific point that the term Terrorism is so completely meaningless, manipulated and mischievous: it’s just a cynical term designed to delegitimize violence and even political acts undertaken by America’s enemies while shielding from criticism the actual Terrorism undertaken by itself and its allies. The spectacle whereby a designated Terrorist group can pay top American politicians to advocate for them even as they engage in violent Terrorist acts, all while being trained, funded and aided by America’s top client state, should forever end the controversy over that glaringly obvious proposition.

but, glenn, terrorism is whatever we say it is and, besides, it's NEVER terrorism when WE do it...

Obama the neo-con is no longer in the closet

2012-02-10T05:20:00.000-08:00

for those of us who've been waiting for obama to rip off his mask and reveal his true self, andrew levine, writing in counterpunch, claims that has now happened...

[W]ith what remains of organized labor finally beginning to fight back, and with the Occupy movements of last fall getting ready to burst forth again, American politics is no longer just an electoral circus in which two semi-established parties huckster their offerings to “moderate” voters. Because Democrats and Republicans are beholden to the same interests and because there are few differences between them that are not merely stylistic or cosmetic, our electoral politics has long been mainly of sociological or even clinical interest; what called for an explanation was why two such likeminded parties became so polarized, why they couldn’t “all just get along.” Now we have more important things to concern us; real politics is back.

But Obama is still relevant, especially in an election year, when our media can be counted on to work overtime covering every facet of the horse race, while ignoring matters of graver consequence. It is therefore timely to reflect on the trajectory of Obama’s governance to this point, and on one rather startling development in the Obama story that has emerged in recent weeks – his newfound willingness to trumpet neoconservative ideas.

Obama, or at least the Obama of term one, will be remembered, above all, for disappointing the hopes of the constituencies that put him in office. He will also be remembered not just for having raised the level of ambient hypocrisy, but for the audacity with which he talks the talk, while walking a very different walk. The more Obama waxes ‘populist,’ the better the rich do, and the more corporate criminality flourishes. The more he speaks of peace, the more the drones fly, and the more his very own Murder Incorporated (Navy Seals and the rest) spread murder and mayhem.

He gets away with it, in large part, because he’s good at fooling some of the people all of the time – not all liberals, but a sizeable number of them. Once it becomes clear to all that the Republicans will nominate their least scary contender, expect those liberals to make fools of themselves big time. No longer can they make a case for Obama by playing up the absurdity of a Trump or Cain or Bachmann presidency. Soon, they won’t have Newt Gingrich to kick around any more either. Expect Rick Santorum too to go the way of what Google says he is — unless, as in Colorado, Minnesota and Missouri, Romney again miscalculates and underspends.

[...]

But Obama’s readiness of late to signal approval for neoconservative ideology marks a new departure. What makes it all the more astonishing is how unnecessary it is. It is not as if anything is changing at the policy level. In deeds, not words, Obama has always been a practicing neocon; from Day One he could justifiably have declared “we are all neoconservatives now.” But he had too much sense to do anything of the sort — then.

[...]

Unless we have all been wrong about how smart Obama is, it could hardly be because he finds neocon musings intellectually engaging. And we can only hope that he isn’t testing the waters, seeing how much liberals of the Obama-is-the-best-of-all-possible-presidents school will accept. The most likely explanation is that, with an election coming, this is a calculated move on Obama’s part to close what space there is that separates him from Romney, the better to capture the rightward veering center.

Whatever the cause, there are indications of late that Obama has taken on board Kagan’s main contention – that American power is not in decline; that, quite the contrary, we are on the threshold of another glorious American century. The plain implication is that there is no hard crash in the offing, and therefore no need for the empire to change course. American world dominance isn’t over yet, and won’t be for the foreseeable future. And for this, the argument goes, the world can only be grateful.

[...]

But until now he has at least tried to be discreet about it; he was just a closet neocon. Now that is changing. Is it because he feels that the pressure to go to war against Iran is becoming irresistible, and that the wisest course for him, in an election year, is: if you can’t beat them, to join them? All that is clear for now is that the neocon con is back, and that it is happening not just in the Romney campaign – and, for what difference it makes, also in Gingrich’s and Santorum’s — but also, blatantly, at Obama’s instigation.

at least perhaps now, we can step away from the cognitive dissonance that has plagued those of us who have continued to cling to the "hope and change" mantra...

Yves Smith: top 12 reasons why the mortgage deal stinks

2012-02-09T15:08:00.000-08:00

jumping to the closing line, "...this settlement is yet another raw demonstration of who wields power in America, and it isn’t you and me"... we knew that, though, didn't we...?

yves smith writing in naked capitalism...

1. We’ve now set a price for forgeries and fabricating documents. It’s $2000 per loan. This is a rounding error compared to the chain of title problem these systematic practices were designed to circumvent. The cost is also trivial in comparison to the average loan, which is roughly $180k, so the settlement represents about 1% of loan balances. It is less than the price of the title insurance that banks failed to get when they transferred the loans to the trust. It is a fraction of the cost of the legal expenses when foreclosures are challenged. It’s a great deal for the banks because no one is at any of the servicers going to jail for forgery and the banks have set the upper bound of the cost of riding roughshod over 300 years of real estate law.

2. That $26 billion is actually $5 billion of bank money and the rest is your money. The mortgage principal writedowns are guaranteed to come almost entirely from securitized loans, which means from investors, which in turn means taxpayers via Fannie and Freddie, pension funds, insurers, and 401 (k)s. Refis of performing loans also reduce income to those very same investors.

3. That $5 billion divided among the big banks wouldn’t even represent a significant quarterly hit. Freddie and Fannie putbacks to the major banks have been running at that level each quarter.

4. That $20 billion actually makes bank second liens sounder, so this deal is a stealth bailout that strengthens bank balance sheets at the expense of the broader public.

5. The enforcement is a joke. The first layer of supervision is the banks reporting on themselves. The framework is similar to that of the OCC consent decrees implemented last year, which Adam Levitin and yours truly, among others, decried as regulatory theater.

6. The past history of servicer consent decrees shows the servicers all fail to comply. Why? Servicer records and systems are terrible in the best of times, and their systems and fee structures aren’t set up to handle much in the way of delinquencies. As Tom Adams has pointed out in earlier posts, servicer behavior is predictable when their portfolios are hit with a high level of delinquencies and defaults: they cheat in all sorts of ways to reduce their losses.

7. The cave-in Nevada and Arizona on the Countrywide settlement suit is a special gift for Bank of America, who is by far the worst offender in the chain of title disaster (since, according to sworn testimony of its own employee in Kemp v. Countrywide, Countrywide failed to comply with trust delivery requirements). This move proves that failing to comply with a consent degree has no consequences but will merely be rolled into a new consent degree which will also fail to be enforced. These cases also alleged HAMP violations as consumer fraud violations and could have gotten costly and emboldened other states to file similar suits not just against Countrywide but other servicers, so it was useful to the other banks as well.

8. If the new Federal task force were intended to be serious, this deal would have not have been settled. You never settle before investigating. It’s a bad idea to settle obvious, widespread wrongdoing on the cheap. You use the stuff that is easy to prove to gather information and secure cooperation on the stuff that is harder to prove. In Missouri and Nevada, the robosigning investigation led to criminal charges against agents of the servicers. But even though these companies were acting at the express direction and approval of the services, no individuals or entities higher up the food chain will face any sort of meaningful charges.

9. There is plenty of evidence of widespread abuses that appear not to be on the attorney generals’ or media’s radar, such as servicer driven foreclosures and looting of investors’ funds via impermissible and inflated charges. While no serious probe was undertaken, even the limited or peripheral investigations show massive failures (60% of documents had errors in AGs/Fed’s pathetically small sample). Similarly, the US Trustee’s office found widespread evidence of significant servicer errors in bankruptcy-related filings, such as inflated and bogus fees, and even substantial, completely made up charges. Yet the services and banks will suffer no real consequences for these abuses.

10. A deal on robosigning serves to cover up the much deeper chain of title problem. And don’t get too excited about the New York, Massachusetts, and Delaware MERS suits. They put pressure on banks to clean up this monstrous mess only if the AGs go through to trial and get tough penalties. The banks will want to settle their way out of that too. And even if these cases do go to trial and produce significant victories for the AGs, they still do not address the problem of failures to transfer notes correctly.

11. Don’t bet on a deus ex machina in terms of the new Federal foreclosure task force to improve this picture much. If you think Schneiderman, as a co-chairman who already has a full time day job in New York, is going to outfox a bunch of DC insiders who are part of the problem, I have a bridge I’d like to sell to you.

12. We’ll now have to listen to banks and their sycophant defenders declaring victory despite being wrong on the law and the facts. They will proceed to marginalize and write off criticisms of the servicing practices that hurt homeowners and investors and are devastating communities. But the problems will fester and the housing market will continue to suffer. Investors in mortgage-backed securities, who know that services have been screwing them for years, will be hung out to dry and will likely never return to a private MBS market, since the problems won’t ever be fixed. This settlement has not only revealed the residential mortgage market to be too big to fail, but puts it on long term, perhaps permanent, government life support.

As we’ve said before, this settlement is yet another raw demonstration of who wields power in America, and it isn’t you and me. It’s bad enough to see these negotiations come to their predictable, sorry outcome. It adds insult to injury to see some try to depict it as a win for long suffering, still abused homeowners.

repeating myself from the previous post, it's sad, so very sad...

Robert Scheer: Our elections are a hoax

2012-02-09T14:55:00.000-08:00

so very, very sad...

robert scheer writing in truthdig...

Our own elections, the ones our government has modeled for the world, are a hoax. What other word should we use to describe this year’s presidential election, whose outcome will turn on which party’s super PACs gets the most generous bribes from billionaires? The Republicans, enabled by decisions of a Supreme Court they still control, were the first out of the gate and are far more culpable in destroying our system of popular governance. But the Democrats, no less committed to winning at any cost to political principle, have now jumped in.

The generally reserved New York Times editorial page responded to the Obama campaign’s decision to seek super PAC funding with a scathing editorial headlined “Another Campaign for Sale.” The Times reminded that Barack Obama, in his State of the Union speech two years ago, called out the Supreme Court justices sitting before him over their decision to free special interests from campaign spending limits. “I don’t think American elections should be bankrolled by America’s most powerful interests,” Obama said then. “They should be decided by the American people.” But sadly, as the Times editorial noted this week, “On Monday, the President abandoned that fundamental principle and gave in to the culture of the Citizens United decision that he once denounced as a ‘threat to our democracy.’ ”

[...]

Once again he has failed to take that case for economic justice to the American people and instead validated the Republican assault on what remains of our democracy.

and, with breakneck speed, we are headed to yet another presidential election where the choices are not really choices at all... i'm both angry and embarrassed that i actually thought 2008 presented a choice... silly me...

Utter, craven, liberal, progressive, Democratic hypocrisy

2012-02-09T07:47:00.000-08:00

i confess to simply not understanding how those who profess to hold the deepest and most fundamental values and principles http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifcan suddenly turn their back on them out of political expediency...

glenn...

I’ve often made the case that one of the most consequential aspects of the Obama legacy is that he has transformed what was once known as “right-wing shredding of the Constitution” into bipartisan consensus, and this is exactly what I mean. When one of the two major parties supports a certain policy and the other party pretends to oppose it — as happened with these radical War on Terror policies during the Bush years — then public opinion is divisive on the question, sharply split. But once the policy becomes the hallmark of both political parties, then public opinion becomes robust in support of it. That’s because people assume that if both political parties support a certain policy that it must be wise, and because policies that enjoy the status of bipartisan consensus are removed from the realm of mainstream challenge. That’s what Barack Obama has done to these Bush/Cheney policies (**see below): he has, as Jack Goldsmith predicted he would back in 2009, shielded and entrenched them as standard U.S. policy for at least a generation, and (by leading his supporters to embrace these policies as their own) has done so with far more success than any GOP President ever could have dreamed of achieving.

like i say, i just don't get it... as hard as it is to admit, i'm more outraged now than i was under the bush administration and i have trouble finding that even possible...

**[T]he notion that the President could do whatever he wants, in secret and with no checks, to anyone he accuses without trial of being a Terrorist – even including eavesdropping on their communications or detaining them without due process. But President Obama has not only done the same thing, but has gone much farther than mere eavesdropping or detention: he has asserted the power even to kill citizens without due process. As Bush’s own CIA and NSA chief Michael Hayden said this week about the Awlaki assassination: “We needed a court order to eavesdrop on him but we didn’t need a court order to kill him. Isn’t that something?” That is indeed “something,” as is the fact that Bush’s mere due-process-free eavesdropping on and detention of American citizens caused such liberal outrage, while Obama’s due-process-free execution of them has not.Beyond that, Obama has used drones to kill Muslim children and innocent adults by the hundreds. He has refused to disclose his legal arguments for why he can do this or to justify the attacks in any way. He has even had rescuers and funeral mourners deliberately targeted. As Hayden said: ”Right now, there isn’t a government on the planet that agrees with our legal rationale for these operations, except for Afghanistan and maybe Israel.” But that is all perfectly fine with most American liberals now that their Party’s Leader is doing it...

three cheers for a democratic president... < /snark >

Same crappy ol' news day...

2012-02-08T19:40:00.000-08:00

sometimes i just can't quite muster the energy to post when all that's out there is the same old shit...

The U.S. Constitution: "America is in danger ... of becoming something of a legal backwater"

2012-02-07T07:45:00.001-08:00

this nyt article makes explicit what has been too long left unsaid - the u.s. constitution no longer serves us well...

The rights guaranteed by the American Constitution are parsimonious by international standards, and they are frozen in amber. As Sanford Levinson wrote in 2006 in “Our Undemocratic Constitution,” “the U.S. Constitution is the most difficult to amend of any constitution currently existing in the world today.” (Yugoslavia used to hold that title, but Yugoslavia did not work out.)

Other nations routinely trade in their constitutions wholesale, replacing them on average every 19 years. By odd coincidence, Thomas Jefferson, in a 1789 letter to James Madison, once said that every constitution “naturally expires at the end of 19 years” because “the earth belongs always to the living generation.” These days, the overlap between the rights guaranteed by the Constitution and those most popular around the world is spotty.

my deepest desire, if only a cherished fantasy, is to see the u.s. convene a constitutional convention... at least the subject is at last being broached...

Bradley Manning nominated for Nobel Peace Prize

2012-02-06T12:59:00.000-08:00

yes, i'm liking it...

from rt...

The name of Private Bradley Manning - a U.S. soldier accused of passing classified material to the whistle blowing website Wikileaks has consistently made it into the headlines, mostly in connection with his trial. But now his name is now on a different list - that of over 200 nominees for the Nobel Peace Prize. His nomination was put forward by the parliamentary group called "The Movement" in the Icelandic Parliament. One of its members Birgitta Yonsdottir says Manning deserves the nomination because it's not a crime to blogger-whistle on war-crimes.

if anyone sees this report on any traditional u.s. news outlet, please let me know...

Romney's Bain & Co., a job "cremator," now advising American Airlines on how to kill their unions, their pensions and their workforce

2012-02-06T09:21:00.000-08:00

ain't this sweet...

As Mitt Romney campaigns in today’s Florida presidential primary, airline workers have been following him with a message about one of his old company’s newest clients: Airline giant AMR, the parent company of American Airlines and American Eagle. AMR, which filed for bankruptcy in November, last week announced plans to retain the advice of Bain & Co., the consulting firm where Romney worked before co-founding private equity firm Bain Capital in 1985.

“He’s talking about creating jobs,” says Transport Workers Union President James Little, but “he’s not a job creator. He’s a job cremator.” TWU represents 24,000 members at American Airlines and American Eagle whose jobs and benefits are threatened in the bankruptcy process.

AMR’s retention of Bain (for consulting on its American Eagle subsidiary) came out the same week as news that AMR had contributed less than $7 millionhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif to its pension fund, out of a normally required $100 million, for the month of January. Days later, AMR increased its contribution. “I have a hard time sitting back,” says Little, “when the company is taking hard-earned money…to pay $525,00 a month to have this company come in and tell them how to cut heads.”

[...]

Reporter Terry Maxon predicted Sunday in the Dallas Morning News that AMR’s proposal tomorrow will include replacing all pensions with a 401(k), outsourcing thousands of jobs, and requiring employees to pay more of the cost of their health insurance. Maxon says those predictions were based on “conversations, management proposals in contract talks and what other airlines adopted” in their own bankruptcies.

this has all the makings of a deadly cocktail for romney, bain and american... unfortunately, american employees and retirees will still be the ones who get screwed...

Yves Smith in Naked Capitalism: the mortgage "settlement" is a stealth bank bailout

2012-02-06T09:04:00.000-08:00

and why would we be surprised...?

Schneiderman MERS Suit and HUD’s Donovan Remarks Confirm That Mortgage “Settlement” is a Stealth Bank Bailout
In case you had any doubts about what the mortgage settlement was really about and why banks that were so keenly opposed to it are now willing to go ahead, the news of the last two days should settle any doubts.

As we had indicated earlier, one of the many leaks about the settlement showed that there had been a major shift its parameters. Of the $25 billion that has been bandied about as a settlement total for the biggest banks, comparatively little (less than $5 billion) is in cash. The rest comes in the form of credits for principal modifications of mortgages.

Originally, that was to come only from mortgages held by banks, meaning they would bear the costs. The fact that this meant that whether a homeowner might benefit would be random (were you one of the lucky ones whose mortgage had not been securitized?) was apparently used as an excuse to morph the deal into a huge win for them: allowing the banks to get credit for modifying mortgages that they don’t own.

The first rule of finance (well, maybe second, “fees are not negotiable” might be number one) is always use other people’s money before your own. So giving the banks permission to modify loans they don’t own guarantees that that is where the overwhelming majority of mortgage modifications will take place, ex those the banks would have done anyhow on their own loans. And the design of the program, that securitized loans will be given only half the credit towards the total, versus 100% for loans the banks own, merely assures that even more damage will be done to investors to pay for the servicers’ misdeeds.

Let me stress: this is a huge bailout for the banks. The settlement amounts to a transfer from retirement accounts (pension funds, 401 (k)s) and insurers to the banks. And without this subsidy, the biggest banks would be in serious trouble

Why? As leading mortgage analyst Laurie Goodman pointed out in a late 2010 presentation, just over half of the private label (non Fannie/Freddie) securitizations have second liens behind them (overwhelmingly home equity lines of credit). Moreover, homes with first liens only have far lower delinquency rates than homes with both first and second liens. Separately, various studies have found that defaults are also correlated with how far underwater a borrower is. If a borrower is too far in negative equity territory, it makes less sense for them to struggle to stay current, no matter how much they love their home.
[...]
The Obama Administration may have decided that investors have acted enough like patsies, given how they have failed to react to rampant servicer abuses, that they judge the risk of investor litigation and a related PR embarrassment to be small. But this battle is not yet over. The rumblings I am hearing from investor-land remind of the sections of the Lord of the Rings when the Ents were finally roused. It isn’t yet clear that investors will act, but if they do, the Administration will be unprepared for the vehemence of their response.

great... let's throw even MORE money at the criminal banksters...

Learning Without Frontiers - Noam Chomsky on the Purpose of Education

2012-02-05T20:09:00.000-08:00

chomsky contrasts education as inquiry, search, creativity, self-expression and a quest for understanding with the concept of education as a system to ensure social order and conformity...

Noam Chomsky discusses the purpose of education, impact of technology, whether education should be perceived as a cost or an investment and the value of standardised assessment. Presented at the Learning Without Frontiers Conference - Jan 25th 2012, London.

The American Empire is reaching a terminal point

2012-02-05T08:56:00.000-08:00

almost three hours of chris hedges... nothing we don't know but, still, a fairly decent run-down of what we're experiencing both individually and as a nation...

The U.S. considers Iran to be a threat...?

2012-02-05T07:29:00.000-08:00

izzat so... let's go to the visuals...

first, a comparison of military spending, iran vs. the u.s...

now, let's look at a map of the u.s. military bases that literally surround iran...

glenn comments...

Indeed: imagine if the blue in that map were the U.S. (rather than Iran), and the large red areas were Mexico and Canada (rather than Iran’s neighbors), and the stars represented Iranian military bases. Then further imagine that Iranian political leaders and media figures routinely told their population that it was the U.S. that was an aggressive, threatening power that had to be stopped: the mocking condemnations of that level of propaganda would be endless. Yet American political officials and commentators feel free to insist, with a straight face, that Iran is an aggressor nation posing a serious threat to the U.S.: such a serious threat, in fact, that war may be necessary to stop it. And there is, tragically, little doubt that if there is an attack on Iran by Israel — with direct U.S. involvement or, more likely, U.S. support and approval — there will be little opposition in either American political party, and even less challenge to the ludicrous claims about the Grave Iranian Threat that will be invoked to justify it.

yesterday, in response to the incessant sabre-rattling, people took to the streets...

Hundreds of protesters demonstrated Saturday in New York and pacifist groups took to the streets in dozens of other US and Canadian cities in a "Day of Mass Action" against a possible war with Iran.

About 500 protesters gathered in Manhattan's Times Square and marched to http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifthe headquarters of the US mission to the United Nations and to the Israeli consulate.

"No war, no sanctions, no intervention, no assassinations," read a banner leading the march.

The demonstrations came as Europe and the United States slapped tough new sanctions on Iran, and Israel this week launched new threats of military intervention if the Islamic republic fails to rein in its suspected nuclear development program.

There is heightened speculation that Israel is contemplating air strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities, fueled in part by US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta's comments to the Washington Post in which he said he believes there is a "strong possibility" that Israel will launch such air strikes this spring.

our super-rich elites know how effective war is as a tool to keep the u.s. population in line... so far, that strategy has bought them almost ten and a half years counting from the time of the start of the afghanistan war through the iraq war and right on to the present day... now, with iraq "finished" and afghanistan slated to "wind down" soon, i'm sure they're just itching to get another one going... my prediction...? this time it's not going to happen...

Chevy end times Super Bowl ad

2012-02-04T10:25:00.000-08:00

and the message here would be what, exactly...?

A man drives his Chevy Silverado through an apocalyptic world predicted by the Mayan calendar.

(thanks to kevin at cryptogon...)

Ecuador's radical approach - actually collect taxes, tax the rich, make the oil companies pay for extracting its natural resource

2012-02-03T16:47:00.000-08:00

what a concept...!

from the real news network...

So much for Obama’s new housing refinance plan

2012-02-03T16:29:00.000-08:00

mike whitney writing in counterpunch via information clearing house...

The truth is the banks want to offload their garbage mortgages onto Uncle Sam to avoid hundreds of billions of dollars in losses. That’s what this refi-ruse is really all about.

The administration estimates that 3.5 million people with private label mortgages will be eligible to refinance into loans backed by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) Many of these are high risk mortgages that will eventually go into foreclosure which is why the banks want to get them off their books. Regrettably, Obama is only too happy to help them achieve that goal.

[...]

To be eligible for Obama’s refi-program, borrowers will need a credit score (FICO) above 580,(which is extremely low), they’ll have to be employed, and they’ll have to be current on their mortgage payments. (for the last 6 months) In other words, lending standards are being eased so the banks can dump as many high-risk mortgages on the FHA as possible. Obama breezily refers to these abysmal lending standards as “cutting through the red tape.”

Applicants will also be able to refinance under the Obama’s program with loan balances up to (get this) 140 percent of the value of their home. So, even if you owe $560,000 on a home that is currently worth $400,000–and you don’t have a dime’s worth of equity in the house–have no fear–you can still get money from Uncle Sugar. This isn’t a good way to keep people in their homes. It just turns them into debt slaves.

well, we figured out some time back that obama is owned by the banks, lock, stock and barrel, so none of this should come as a big surprise...

Percent Job Losses in Post WWII Recessions

2012-02-03T11:02:00.000-08:00

atrios...

Ultimately the point is that in February of 2012, this is still the scariest chart ever. Hopefully it will continue to become less scary more fast, but I don't think anybody can declare with any confidence that this is inevitable. People can believe that, of course, but it isn't yet obviously true.

(click on graphic for larger image)

yeah, it's scarey all right... besides me, i know at least a half dozen other people who are looking for work, some of them for over two years...

The U.S. Government’s conduct of most affairs behind a wall of secrecy is ... cynical, manipulative and self-protective

2012-02-02T08:01:00.000-08:00

glenn delivers an insightful analysis of the aclu lawsuit against various agencies of the obama administration — the justice and defense departments and the cia — over their refusal to disclose any information about the assassination of american citizens...

Adam Smith's "invisible hand" is a complete misinterpretation

2012-01-31T19:10:00.000-08:00

chomsky...

Another goddam $10B bailout - American Airlines wants to hand its pensions over to the PBGC

2012-01-31T16:16:00.000-08:00

on december 1, i predicted this...

American Airlines will use its bankruptcy as a $10B bailout by kicking its pensions to taxpayers

based on this...

Taxpayers May Have To Pay AMR Pension Bill

based on the precedent set by united airlines in 2005 when i posted this...

United defaults on pension plans; CEO buys $4.5M condo

so now we have this...

AMR To Seek End To Worker Pensions - PBGC

The US Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, which has responsibility for insuring certain benefits under private defined benefit pension plans, said on Tuesday it believes American Airlines will seek to terminate employee pensions in bankruptcy.

The agency said it filed a USD$92 million lien against American parent AMR for the balance of unpaid pension plan contributions. It added that the lien was applied to AMR assets outside the United States, mainly in Latin America.

[...]

The US Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, which has responsibility for insuring certain benefits under private defined benefit pension plans, said on Tuesday it believes American Airlines will seek to terminate employee pensions in bankruptcy.

The agency said it filed a USD$92 million lien against American parent AMR for the balance of unpaid pension plan contributions. It added that the lien was applied to AMR assets outside the United States, mainly in Latin America.

make no mistake... what american airlines is asking for is a $10B bailout... bankruptcy is a very convenient way for companies to void their labor contracts, neuter their unions and hand off their pension liabilities to ~~the government~~ ~~taxpayers~~ ~~hapless citizens~~ us suckers to pick up the tab... privatizing profits, socializing losses... it's the american way...

The more we grasp that our true allies may not speak our language ... the more powerful we will become

2012-01-30T09:52:00.000-08:00

chris hedges...

Corporate power is global, and resistance to it cannot be restricted by national boundaries. Corporations have no regard for nation-states. They assert their power to exploit the land and the people everywhere. They play worker off of worker and nation off of nation. They control the political elites in Ottawa as they do in London, Paris and Washington. This, I suspect, is why the tactics to crush the Occupy movement around the globe have an eerie similarity—infiltrations, surveillance, the denial of public assembly, physical attempts to eradicate encampments, the use of propaganda and the press to demonize the movement, new draconian laws stripping citizens of basic rights, and increasingly harsh terms of incarceration.

Our solidarity should be with activists who march on Tahrir Square in Cairo or set up encampamentos in Madrid. These are our true compatriots. The more we shed ourselves of national identity in this fight, the more we grasp that our true allies may not speak our language or embrace our religious and cultural traditions, the more powerful we will become.

i have often been dismayed at how much of a bubble we live in here in the u.s... it's particularly apparent to me when i return from outside the country... the only global perspective most of us have is what dribbles down to us from our propaganda-spouting media (iran, iraq, afghanistan, arab spring, etc.) or from a dim awareness that virtually everything we buy - short of automobiles and food - comes from china...

fortunately, the occupy movement has begun to move beyond that kind of insular thinking at least to the extent that an increasing number of those involved identify with what's happening in tahrir square, spain and chile...

hedges is right... there is a global awakening and we need to embrace it as such... when i talk with my afghan friends - as i do regularly - i find they are struggling with the same issues of repression by their super-rich elites as their compatriots in egypt and our own occupy protestors here in the u.s... the false dichotomies of patriotism and nationalism heaped on us by our handlers only serve to keep us from the full realization that the "99%" are under the thumb of the "1%" globally, not just inside our borders...

America is a nine-hundred pound man imprisoned in a fetid trailer bedroom begging for one more case of Little Debbie Cocoa Cremes

2012-01-30T08:47:00.000-08:00

post headline from a james howard kunstler piece on obama's sotu entitled "Jive Talkin"...

America is a nine-hundred pound man imprisoned in a fetid trailer bedroom begging for one more case of Little Debbie Cocoa Cremes before the front-end-loader bashes through the wall to haul him to intensive care. America just wants to hear another story about its own wonderfulness before that happens. America's soul is so lost that it has disappeared into the same cosmic wilderness that MF Global's client accounts were last seen entering.

[...]

I've had enough of Obama, though I voted for him in 2008. I won't vote for him again. But I'm not altogether confident that any of us will be voting for anyone in the fall of 2012. Too many systems we depend on are spinning out of control. I suppose we will continue feeding ourselves a diet of lies and evasions until circumstances become so extreme that language itself loses all relevance and only real action will answer. I believe that moment is approaching in the yet-to-be-acted-out political uproars of the spring and summer. In the meantime, American leadership is bankrupt. Just accept the fact that America has no legitimate leadership. The vacuum is total and we know how nature feels about a vacuum.

occasionally, kunstler is a fun read but i can't imagine being cooped up in the same room with him for very long without one or the other of us starting to foam at the mouth...

Whining U.S. banks make me physically ill

2012-01-29T13:42:00.000-08:00

great gobs of steaming bullshit... the banks are one of the prime culprits in why the world economy is in the mess it is in right now and, despite the trillions of dollars that the u.s. and the eu have tossed their way, have continued to reward themselves without any regard for the general welfare of the people they were chartered to serve... now, they're saying if they don't get their way, it will only delay any recovery... they can all go directly to hell...

Banks warn rule change will hurt recovery

US banks fear that any recovery in the US housing market will be further delayed as a result of moves to remove credit ratings from American regulations, which will boost banks’ capital requirements by billions of dollars.

Bankers have until Friday to respond to a proposal by the Federal Reserve and other regulators that would increase the “risk weights” on securitised assets, driving up sharply the equity capital that banks are forced to set against them.

screw 'em... they haven't done anything for anybody but themselves...

The power-brokers in the global economy are finally realising that something has gone badly awry

2012-01-29T13:22:00.000-08:00

a thoughtful, well-written op-ed in yesterday's guardian...

We can now see the true cost of globalisation

The worldwide public realises there is something deeply wrong with today's world economic system

i particularly like the closing comment...

[A]s we sift through the wreckage of the Great Recession, perhaps it's finally time to heed Marx's words, and stand up for workers everywhere.

i would re-word that just a bit to "it's time to stand up for the common good of all peoples everywhere"...

It has become totally legal for rich people to run politicians the same way they might run horses or greyhounds

2012-01-28T08:25:00.000-08:00

the above title is taken from a common dreams post by jennifer browdy de hernandez...

As in Germany before the Kristallnacht, none of us here in the U.S. wants to believe that anything could happen to destroy our cherished freedoms, our vaunted “American way of life.” We don’t want to admit, even to ourselves, the extent to which our freedoms are already being encroached upon, day by day.

Just last week, for example, there was an outrageous episode in Arizona, where the government declared a whole long list of books to be unsuitable for school use, and went so far as to direct the school librarians and teachers to pull them from the shelves, box them up and put them into deep storage.

Among the authors banned are some of my favorite writers—Gloria Anzaldua, Elizabeth Martinez, Paulo Freire.

Yes, that Paulo Freire, the famous Brazilian educator and free thinker who wrote Pedagogy of the Oppressed, a brilliant analysis of the way that traditional education indoctrinates students into conformity and submission to authority.

Freire proposed that instead of a banking style of education, where knowledge is deposited into students, who are then required to spit it back upon demand, education worth its salt should empower students to think for themselves.

Such a simple idea, but so powerful, too. Education should teach people to think for themselves, and to work with each other to come to consensus on issues of importance to the larger society.

Isn’t that just what the Occupy movements have been trying to do? If Freire were alive, he would be out there in the thick of the Occupy action, inspiring the young to shake off the false animation of Zombieland, and insist on dancing to their own authentic beat.

isn't it totally bizarre that education that empowers people to think for themselves should be so threatening...? of course, taken in the context of the super-rich elites who are so desperate to maintain their hold on money and power, i suppose it makes sense to keep people dumb, docile and locked in a fear-based mindset...

Lawrence Lessig and Chris Hedges on Citizens United, the corporatocracy and the courts

2012-01-27T15:11:00.000-08:00

occupy the courts...

On January 20th, occupiers across the country rallied together in protest against the insidious influence of the corporations over the judiciary. Shortly before the rally in Foley Square, New York CIty, Lawrence Lessig and Chris Hedges met in front of Occupy TVNY's cameras to discuss their vision of change.

Social media surveillance in the National Security State

2012-01-26T18:42:00.000-08:00

i saw this article earlier today and, given how disgusted i am with most everything that's coming out of the obama administration, i have to confess, i merely shrugged, rolled my eyes and moved on... then it popped up again in another venue and i thought, well, hell, it deserves any additional visibility i might be able to give it...

FBI seeking social media monitoring tool

The US Federal Bureau of Investigation is looking for a tool to mine social media for intelligence tips.

The US domestic law enforcement agency is asking information technology contractors about the feasibility of building a tool that would “enhance its techniques for collecting and sharing ‘open source’ actionable intelligence.”

The January 19 open request was published on a website offering federal business opportunities and was first reported by New Scientist magazine.

The FBI said it is seeking an “open source and social media alert, mapping and analysis application solution” for its Strategic Information and Operations Center (SIOC).

“Social media has become a primary source of intelligence because it has become the premier first response to key events and the primal alert to possible developing situations,” the FBI request said.

“Intelligence analysts will often use social media to receive the first tip-off that a crisis has occurred,” it said.

The FBI said the tool “must have the ability to rapidly assemble critical open source information and intelligence that will allow SIOC to quickly vet, identity, and geo-locate breaking events, incidents and emerging threats.”

It would need to be able to “instantly search and monitor key words and strings in all ‘publicly available’ tweets across the Twitter site and any other ‘publicly available’ social networking sites/forums.”

It would also need the ability to “search the data across a myriad of parameters and view terrorist activities by location, terrorist group, and type of attack and see trends and analytics.”

it's sad... five years ago, i would have been apoplectic over something like this, along with a lot of other people... now, after having gagged down serial surveillance atrocities and constitution-shredding maneuvers year after year, this is just one more in a long series...

On the eve of the Citizens United SCOTUS ruling

2012-01-26T13:04:00.000-08:00

how cool is this...?

G8 & NATO in Chicago - Adbusters calls for #Occupy Chicago for the month of May

2012-01-26T10:25:00.001-08:00

from adbusters...

Tactical Briefing #25

Hey you redeemers, rebels and radicals out there,

Against the backdrop of a global uprising that is simmering in dozens of countries and thousands of cities and towns, the G8 and NATO will hold a rare simultaneous summit in Chicago this May. The world’s military and political elites, heads of state, 7,500 officials from 80 nations, and more than 2,500 journalists will be there.

And so will we.

On May 1, 50,000 people from all over the world will flock to Chicago, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and #OCCUPYCHICAGO for a month. With a bit of luck, we’ll pull off the biggest multinational occupation of a summit meeting the world has ever seen.

And this time around we’re not going to put up with the kind of police repression that happened during the Democratic National Convention protests in Chicago, 1968 … nor will we abide by any phony restrictions the City of Chicago may want to impose on our first amendment rights. We’ll go there with our heads held high and assemble for a month-long people’s summit … we’ll march and chant and sing and shout and exercise our right to tell our elected representatives what we want … the constitution will be our guide.

And when the G8 and NATO meet behind closed doors on May 19, we’ll be ready with our demands: a Robin Hood Tax … a ban on high frequency ‘flash’ trading … a binding climate change accord … a three strikes and you’re out law for corporate criminals … an all out initiative for a nuclear-free Middle East … whatever we decide in our general assemblies and in our global internet brainstorm – we the people will set the agenda for the next few years and demand our leaders carry it out.

And if they don’t listen … if they ignore us and put our demands on the back burner like they’ve done so many times before … then, with Gandhian ferocity, we’ll flashmob the streets, shut down stock exchanges, campuses, corporate headquarters and cities across the globe … we’ll make the price of doing business as usual too much to bear.

Jammers, pack your tents, muster up your courage and prepare for a big bang in Chicago this Spring. If we don’t stand up now and fight now for a different kind of future we may not have much of a future … so let’s live without dead time for a month in May and see what happens …

for the wild,
Culture Jammers HQ

if nothing else, it would be nice to be able to give rahm the finger in person...

Betrayal by the “good guys” for whom I have ended up voting has become the norm

2012-01-26T09:33:00.000-08:00

robert scheer...

I’ll admit it: Listening to Barack Obama, I am ready to enlist in his campaign against the feed-the-rich Republicans ... until I recall that I once responded in the same way to Bill Clinton’s faux populism. And then I get angry because betrayal by the “good guys” for whom I have ended up voting has become the norm.

Yes, betrayal, because if Obama meant what he said in Tuesday’s State of the Union address about holding the financial industry responsible for its scams, why did he appoint the old Clinton crowd that had legalized those scams to the top economic posts in his administration? Why did he hire Timothy Geithner, who has turned the Treasury Department into a concierge service for Wall Street tycoons?

Why hasn’t he pushed for a restoration of the Glass-Steagall Act, which Clinton’s deregulation reversed? Does the president really believe that the Dodd-Frank slap-on-the-wrist sellout represents “new rules to hold Wall Street accountable, so a crisis like this never happens again”? Can he name one single too-big-to-fail banking monstrosity that has been reduced in size on his watch instead of encouraged to grow ever larger by Treasury and Fed bailouts and interest-free money?

When Obama declared Tuesday evening “no American company should be able to avoid paying its fair share of taxes by moving jobs and profits overseas,” wasn’t he aware that Jeffrey Immelt, the man he appointed to head his jobs council, is the most egregious offender? Immelt, the CEO of GE, heads a company with most of its workers employed in foreign countries, a corporation that makes 82 percent of its profit abroad and has paid no U.S. taxes in the past three years.

scheer goes on to list more grievances but, imho, is seriously remiss in not citing obama's disgraceful record in foreign policy and civil liberties...